Thomas Murner (1475-1537) as an innovator in university teaching. Didactic games and the translation of legal texts

Abstract

Thomas Murner is still regarded in scholarship primarily as a controversial theologian and a prominent opponent of Martin Luther. This perspective, however, obscures the fact that a substantial part of his work is rooted in late medieval and early modern cultures of education and knowledge. This article foregrounds Murner as an  innovative didactician and examines the conditions and functions of his game-based forms of teaching within the university context around 1500.

The point of departure is Murner’s didactic learning games, card games as well as chess and dice variants, with which he made logic, Roman law and prosody learnable through visualisation, ordering, and memorative repetitio. Within the framework of the ars memorativa, Murner was the first of his time to employ the medium of the playing card systematically as a teaching and mnemonic apparatus for academic subjects. At the same time, contemporary reactions, ranging from admiration to mockery and suspicions of magic, reveal how strongly these experiments oscillated between academic norms and didactic transgression. Added to this are his achievements as a translator, through which he rendered learned knowledge, especially legal texts, into the vernacular, while also teaching in that language and thereby opening up new forms of mediation between university scholarship and a broader public.

What is new is the positioning of Murner within the history of universities and knowledge from a digital-historical perspective: prosopographical analyses based on the data of the Repertorium Academicum Germanicum (RAG) sharpen his profile as an exceptionally mobile and innovative scholar.